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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoJulio Cortez | Associated Press PhotosRobert Post and his wife, Jane, center, talk to neighbor Gail Kender in their Mantoloking, N.J., home. The Posts’ land line was damaged by superstorm Sandy, and Verizon will not restore it.

By Peter SvenssonAssociated Press • Tuesday July 9, 2013 1:48 AM

MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Robert Post misses his phone line.

Post, 85, has a pacemaker that needs to be checked once a month by phone. But the copper wiring
that once connected his home to the rest of the world is gone, and the phone company refuses to
restore it.

In October, superstorm Sandy pushed the sea over Post’s neighborhood, leaving hundreds of homes
wrecked and one floating in the bay. The homes on this sandy spit of land along the Jersey Shore
are being rebuilt, but Verizon doesn’t want to replace washed-away lines and waterlogged
underground cables. Phone lines are outdated, the company says.

Mantoloking is one of the first places in the country where the traditional phone line is going
dead. For now, Verizon, the country’s second-largest land-line phone company, is taking the lead by
replacing phone lines with wireless alternatives. But competitors including AT&T have made it
clear they want to follow. It’s the beginning of a technological turning point, representing the
receding tide of copper-wire land lines, which have been used since commercial service began in
1877.

The number of U.S. phone lines peaked at 186 million in 2000. Since then, more than 100 million
copper lines have been disconnected, says the industry trade group US Telecom. The lines have been
supplanted by cellphones and Internet-based phone service offered by way of cable television and
fiber-optic wiring. Just one in four U.S. households will have a copper phone line at the end of
this year, according to estimates from US Telecom. AT&T would like to turn off its network of
copper land lines by the end of the decade.

For most people, the phone line’s demise will have little impact. But there are pockets of the
country where copper lines are still critical for residents. As a result, state regulators and
consumer advocates are increasingly concerned about how the transition will unfold.

“The real question is not: Are we going to keep copper forever? The real question is: How are we
going to handle this transition?” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge, a
Washington-based group that advocates for public access to the Internet and other communications
technologies.

The elderly and people in rural areas, where cell coverage may be poor or nonexistent, will be
most affected by disappearing phone lines, Feld said. “Are we going to handle this transition in a
way that recognizes that we have vulnerable populations here?”

Verizon says replacing the lines just doesn’t make economic sense. When they were originally
laid down, the phone was the only two-way telecommunications service available in the home, and the
company could look forward to decades of use out of each line. Now, it would cost Verizon hundreds
of dollars per home to rewire a neighborhood, but less than a quarter of customers are likely to
sign up for phone service and many of those drop it after a year or two.

“If we fixed the copper, there’s a good likelihood people wouldn’t even use it,” said Tom
Maguire, Verizon’s senior vice president of operations support.

Verizon also wants to get out of rebuilding phone lines on the western end of New York’s Fire
Island, another sliver of sand that was flooded by Sandy. The island lacks paved roads. It can be
reached only by ferry, and its residents are overwhelmingly seasonal. Some of the copper lines
still work, but Verizon is no longer maintaining them.

Verizon provided service to about 2,700 lines on western Fire Island before the storm. But even
then, 80 percent of calls to and from the island were wireless. Now, few of the lines work, but the
cellular service is fine.

New York state regulators have given Verizon provisional permission to consider its wireless
Voice Link boxes as stand-ins for regular phone service. Verizon technicians install the
4-inch-square boxes with protruding antennas in homes and connect them to the home phone wiring.
The home is then linked to Verizon’s wireless network. When subscribers lift their phone handsets,
they hear a dial tone. But the box doesn’t work with remote medical monitoring devices, home alarm
systems or faxes. It can’t accept collect calls or connect callers with an operator when they dial
0. It also can’t be used with dial-up modems, credit-card machines or international calling
cards.

Post’s house in Mantoloking was built 83 years ago. His wife estimates it has been connected to
a phone line for 80 years. Now, to get his pacemaker checked, he heads once a month to a friend’s
home in Bay Head, the next town over, which still has a copper phone line.

Most of his neighbors have cable phone service from Comcast Corp. that can do most of what Voice
Link can’t. The service, for instance, can relay Post’s pacemaker information. But Post just isn’t
eager to switch to the cable company. He says he doesn’t trust it. And he’s not alone. Customer
perception of cable-TV providers historically has been poor, because of service failures and annual
price increases, according to surveys for the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

In other areas, Verizon is replacing copper phone lines with optical fiber, which allows the
company to offer cable-like TV services and ultrafast broadband. Water can short out and corrode
copper wire, but optical fiber is made of glass and transmits light rather than electricity, so it’s
far more resistant to flooding. But the cost of wiring a neighborhood with fiber-optic lines can
run more than $1,000 a home.

“Everybody would love for us to put in fiber, but that’s just not practical,” Maguire said.

AT&T would like to have all its land-line phone equipment turned off by 2020. Verizon’s
Maguire envisions a gradual phase-out, starting right now.